Marsha Linehan tells the story of her journey from suicidal teenager
to world-renowned developer of the life-saving behavioral therapy DBT,
using her own struggle to develop life skills for others.
"This book is a victory on both sides of the page."--Gloria Steinem
"Are you one of us?" a patient once asked Marsha Linehan, the
world-renowned psychologist who developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy.
"Because if you were, it would give all of us so much hope."
Over the years, DBT had saved the lives of countless people fighting
depression and suicidal thoughts, but Linehan had never revealed that
her pioneering work was inspired by her own desperate struggles as a
young woman. Only when she received this question did she finally decide
to tell her story.
In this remarkable and inspiring memoir, Linehan describes how, when she
was eighteen years old, she began an abrupt downward spiral from popular
teenager to suicidal young woman. After several miserable years in a
psychiatric institute, Linehan made a vow that if she could get out of
emotional hell, she would try to find a way to help others get out of
hell too, and to build a life worth living. She went on to put herself
through night school and college, living at a YWCA and often scraping
together spare change to buy food. She went on to get her PhD in
psychology, specializing in behavior therapy. In the 1980s, she achieved
a breakthrough when she developed Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, a
therapeutic approach that combines acceptance of the self and ways to
change. Linehan included mindfulness as a key component in therapy
treatment, along with original and specific life-skill techniques. She
says, "You can't think yourself into new ways of acting; you can only
act yourself into new ways of thinking."
Throughout her extraordinary scientific career, Marsha Linehan remained
a woman of deep spirituality. Her powerful and moving story is one of
faith and perseverance. Linehan shows, in Building a Life Worth
Living, how the principles of DBT really work--and how, using her life
skills and techniques, people can build lives worth living.
